Reality as a Dream.

The Byzantine Emperors promised to the Serbs peace and land in their Empire in the Balkans if they accepted the Christian faith.  And the Serbs accepted the Christian faith.  The Emperors Basil and Constantine agreed to give their sister in marriage to Vladimir, King of Kieff, if he would embrace the Christian faith.  And King Vladimir embraced the Christian faith.  These may be considered very petty motives!  Yet this was not the price to tie the mighty idol Perun on a horse’s tail and to carry him into the water of Dnieper.  The principal motive was the striking reality of the Christian foundation.  The Christian message was like a dream ("We have been in Heaven,” reported the Russian delegates, returning from Saint Sophia)—­the Slavs loved dreams and poetry very much; but the Christian faith was stated to be a reality, and the Slavs, as men the world over, considered reality as more solid than any dream.  Instead of a nightmare of youthful dreams, as the Slav pagan theology was, came now a bright poetry warranted both as a past and present reality.

It will remain as the greatest wonder in history how a poor Man, who preached in Palestine for about two years, who scarcely had a hundred followers at the end of His mission, who was crucified and died a shameful death, whose cause seemed a quite desperate episode, scornfully rejected or fearfully abandoned by all those who knew it—­how this poor Man replaced successively the mightiest gods the human imagination ever invented:  Zeus in Olympus, Jupiter in the Capitol, Wothan in the North, and at last also Perun in Kieff.  The secret lies, I think, in the reality of His human life, in the mystery of His resurrection, and in the amazing enthusiasm with which thousands of His followers afterwards suffered death for Him and His cause.

However, Christ entered the Slav world in an epoch when, not only one man after another bowed before Him, but nation after nation.  He came to our ancestors no more as a humble preacher, but as a Lord, under whose feet lay already conquered Zeus, Jupiter and Wothan.  He came to us, not from a poor Bethlehem cottage, but from the most brilliant temple upon earth, from the Saint Sophia in Constantinople.  He came with a wonderful three-fold mission, to serve, to fight, to reigning one word, to be “all in all.”  He entered the Roman world as a humble servant.  I am afraid He remained in this world for ever only as a servant.  But He entered the Slav world as a Lord, and until to-day He remains there as the Lord.

CHRISTUS MILITANS.